Political Scene: The Past and Future of Drone Warfare

The Obama Administration’s justifications for its use of drones to carry out targeted killings in Afghanistan, Yemen, and other countries where members of Al Qaeda live has satisfied few people outside of the Administration. So on Thursday, when John Brennan, President Obama’s nominee to lead the C.I.A., sat before the Senate Intelligence Committee, questions about the legality of drone attacks, the definition of “imminence,” and the security of due process for American citizens loomed over the proceedings. Perhaps Brennan, who Jane Mayer calls a “complicated” man, is the best fit to navigate the tricky terrain. On this week’s Political Scene podcast, Mayer joins Steve Coll and the host Amelia Lester to discuss the drone program’s questionable legal standing.

The Administration faces a tough task in trying to defend the drone program, and offer a coherent legal framework for it, after the program has already been in effect for so long and involved so many different parts of the U.S. government. Indeed, as Mayer notes, it may be too late now to come up with a clear justification. The relevant law has been outpaced by war and technology.

“It’s a kind of mish-mosh that’s been constructed after the fact, all stemming, I think, from the post-9/11 legal construct, which changed the definition of terrorist from criminals to combatants, and when that happened it basically confused all of the laws.”

This convoluted, post-hoc framework may come back to haunt the U.S. down the line. Coll offers a dim vision for the future of a world with drones:

We await the day when the Chinese or the Russians start operating under the legal theories that we’re operating under on American soil. So, let’s imagine twenty-five or thirty years from now, these drones are faster, easier to launch from ships, they have more range, they’re quieter. And let’s suppose—it would seem unlikely, but let’s suppose—that the Chinese Communist Party is still an authoritarian government with a monopoly of power in Beijing, and they decide that that dissidents operating in the United States are plotting imminently to overthrow the Chinese government… then China has a right of self-defense to fly drones over American territory and kill those plotters before they can act.

The future that Coll describes isn’t only a possibility—it’s a past we’ve already lived through. In the middle of the twentieth century, the idea of atomic warfare enjoyed broad support, as drones do now, until it became clear, as Coll says, that “the implication of that was Armageddon.”